"dr" wrote (SNIP)

Anyway, I moved house recently, April actually, went straight off and got
myself an allotment, great I thought. It was freshly ploughed which I
thought was a great help. Little did I know.

The allotment had been obviously unused for some years, is infested with
dock, thistle, plantains, bindweed the list is endless. You think of a
perennial, pernicious weed and I think it's there. Thus ploughing it was
quite probably the single worst thing that could be done.

So I figured i've little choice at this point, it's either months of hand
digging and extracting weed roots forever, or I wait 2 weeks for leaves to
show, then glyphosate the lot of them. 2 weeks later I do just that,
about
5 or 6 days after that I peer over the fence to see how the poison is
doing
and guess what, the local allotment secretary has only gone and ploughed
the whole thing again. Complete waste of £20 of poison and a few hours of
spraying, but worse than that, i've now got to wait another 2 weeks for
the
leaves to re-appear and then start again. I can hardly plant anything now
until the end of June by which time most things won't take properly.

I mean it's hard enough work taking on an old allotment but this kind
of "trying to be helpful" stupidity really rankles me. He didn't ask me
first, he didn't even take note of the fact that most of the weeds we're
getting a little yellow or distorted, just went in and ploughed it all
again I couldn't believe it. Actually makes me wish i'd had it scraped.

That Allotment Secretary must be an idiot not any sort of practical
gardener. Hope you asked for a refund of rent due to the unavailability of
your plot for growing this season.

--
Regards
Bob Hobden